Jailbreaking Just Got A Little Harder: Apple Closes Two Year Old Exploit In iOS 6

Back in August of last year, famed jailbreak hacker Comex — the mind responsible for the famed JailbreakMe exploit — hung up his old hacker hat and went to work at Apple as an intern.

Here’s a coincidence then. In iOS 6, the top secret, much guarded exploit used by developers to root their devices — first founded by Comex! — has suddenly been closed after being open for two years, as recent jailbreak superstar pod2g just made note on his Twitter account.

pod2g notes:

R.I.P. the exploit used by developers to root the device. Found by @comex in 2010. A 2 years old bug closed with iOS 6.

Now, the good news here is that this kernel bug exploit was actually unusable for general release jailbreaks, because it required an iOS Developer Account. That means that whatever jailbreak exploits the community already has planned for iOS 6 shouldn’t be affected, because they tend to keep a few already known exploits secret so that they have an avenue of attack when Apple updates the firmware. The bad news, of course, is that this might make finding new exploits even harder than it already is.

The big question here, of course, is whether or not this is a coincidence or Comex sold the exploit out. What do you think?